“Being Human” — Personalization
We’ve pushed for reductive thinking for a long time. It’s related to survival and some animal instinct. That said, I feel we’ve taken it too far, or at least held onto several components of harmful reductive thinking beyond their usefulness. Reducing is meant to take away the burden of complexity inherent in a shared human existence, and I think of it often as “underthinking,” akin to overthinking which also has its dangers.
Personalization isn’t classically underthinking, but it is definitely reductive thinking. The central idea for personalization is that blame, fault, or praise is disproporitionately delegated in a situation. More specifically, personalization refers to an individual claiming an inappropriate amount of responsibility for the events unfurling around them. This behavior is commonplace, and rightfully so. There’s a distinctly human element to this personalization, beyond what we might consider “animal,” though that’s definitely arguable. The core of personalization comes down to control — which here refers to personal autonomy and individual impact on others, and immediate surroundings. Most commonly we might think of a “control freak,” describing someone overly particular about themselves and their methods, and who may extend that persnickety attitude to those around them. As a control freak, this is about me and I’ll be spending the rest of this article launching personal attacks on myself.
When we look at blame, or responsibility in the context of control, it seems like a human trait — that is to say it’s not animal in nature. I disagree slightly, in that I believe this to be an emergent behavior from our need to protect our ego. There is a VERY animal, defiant cry of the ego: “I am HERE!” Beyond that, in what may be uniquely human, the call of “being here” is usually caveat to “and I refuse to leave.” In my opinion, when we consider the ego and our actions rooted in ego there’s also a definite line from our actions to a fear or discomfort with death and mortality. We act to control ourselves, others, and the environment to stabilize our world for our own perspective and insist upon our being as a persistent process.
Put shortly, I exert myself to demand control because I fear death, or at the very least damage to my being.
Control — and the ego as a result — are central to a lot of “irrational” behavior though. Personalization is a specific way of demanding control that really highlights the wild naïveté of the ego. Personalization is a claim that I am responsible for actions and events definitively beyond my grasp.
It’s a shout of “I am powerful, look at my power.”
If you’ve ever been in a situation where someone ACTUALLY verbalizes something similar to that, you’ll recognize the silliness immediately.
Concretely, I see myself air on personalization a lot; my father did it all the time while I was a child, and I definitely learned the behavior. The tricky thing about the behavior is that in the flashback, it just looks like my dad is ceding the point, being polite, or submitting to lubricate the situation. In fact, by claiming responsibility for actions and events beyond his control, I posit he did irreparable damage to his relationship with my mother, my siblings, and myself.
There’s definitely innocuous representations of the behavior — in college, I often agreed to pay the entire tab when I ate out with friends because it expedited the process of us leaving. I did it because of my own social discomfort around discussing money AND because I hate being in loud, crowded places for long. The subtle implications I reinforced every time though were that I could consistently be relied on in that way (which I didn’t appreciate in earnest) and that I was accruing favors as a result.
There’s an important piece buried in that example. Personalization is often most dangerous, AND insidious, because it couples very easily with other forms of underthinking. I’m not ALWAYS going to foot the bill, and my actions don’t necessitate any reciprocity, but given the precedence of underthinking both of these become at least “reasonable” assumptions.
Because personalization is such a small addition to other forms of underthinking, it ends up sneaking in everywhere. This is made worse because acting against personalization means admitting rather unpleasant truths:
I am small.
I can only choose my own actions.
My ability to affect change is limited to my size.
While these are not particularly enjoyable truths, they are very much true even in the context of blackmail and bribery, favors and folly. Gun to my head, I can still choose death even if the choice is hard. Action almost definitely cannot truly be forced or enforced in another.
There’s a relief soon after the unpleasant truth though. Unfortunately, the most accessible context is rather morose. When lives are on the line, or especially when lives have been lost, we are quick to point fingers and demand blame and culpability (of ourselves and others). In a decent chunk of deaths though, there is not someONE responsible; more likely the deaths are a result of a wildly irreducible confluence of actions.
A common example is looking at WWI as it hinges on the assassination of Franz Ferdinand. It’s documented as THE start of the war, but the world being at war does not sensibly start with the shot of a single gun. There had to be other factors — those leading to the assassination, or those contributing to global unrest. It’s not to slough off the assassination as unimportant, but personalization is about highlighting the spark that lit the blaze rather than the work that went into making the world into a tinderbox.
And there it is. The relief is that in being small, powerless, and utterly human my culpability is also small, powerless, and utterly human. I am not blameless at all times, but I can only claim blame for my direct actions.
For anyone that knows me, this is why I apologize VERY rarely.
In general, I’ve strived to empathize with the hurt and claim responsibility where I can. Beyond that, I seek to comfort and resonate with the human pain rather than assume it for myself. Moreover, wherever I find personal responsibility and genuine space for my autonomy is also then space for me to grow. In the case I speak out of privilege and say something xenophobic — I can’t genuinely take responsibility for the racist system, but I can claim my own action in that system and seek to change my behavior.
More relief; by working to find genuine components of culpability rather than overstating my responsibility I can contribute to the deconstruction of harmful systems.
In other words, to do my part toward equity, I have to actually be willing to claim the appropriate amount of culpability. Furthermore, once I’ve seen my own culpability, I can call out culpability in others and hold them to their own complicit actions.
It seems that personalization is somewhat hard to manage well. We’ve got a somewhat innate drive to proclaim our autonomy well beyond its reach, often to our fault. Acting against that urge means admitting to ourselves and others that we are small and have only direct control over our beings. There’s some conflation there I want to emphasize explicitly. Often, there’s an idea that someone or something small is also unimportant. I believe this ties back into how and why the ego pushes for personalization — humans seem to constantly be on the cusp, or dipping their toes into a pool of existential crises. There’s a subtle dissonance in the background:
“What is my purpose? Do I matter? Does anything matter?”
Flatly, deconstructing personalization does not mean adopting nihilism and demanding that I am small and therefore cannot matter. Just because I don’t control another’s actions doesn’t mean I am not considered in their decision making. It just means that I don’t control them. That sort of syllogistic thinking that takes us from small to inconsequential is another form of underthinking I’ll have to tackle another time.
For now, it’s enough to underline where to see personalization and how to healthily work against it:
- I am small and my decisions are my own.
- Others are small and make their own decisions.
- We can consider each other even if we do not control each other.
Stay tuned, and thanks for reading.
Sincerely Not My Fault,
August
